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BaKongo Cosmology
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14997 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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9 / 1988 |
5,167 Words |
| Author
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Wyatt MacGaffey
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European visitors to Africa have often been reluctant to credit the people they meet with the capacity for abstract or systematic though. In the 1880s, travelers and missionaries with experience of the Lower Congo believed "the ideas of the natives" amounted to no more than "a ruinous heap." Said one, "There is no coherence in their beliefs, and their ideas about cosmogony are very nebulous." Anthropologists have concurred; "One would seek in vain in [Kongo] culture for large and coherent conceptions and structures such as would give the human reality they incarnate the prestige accorded in Africa and elsewhere to other civilizations."
Yet, some African civilizations have indeed earned prestige for the complexity of their cosmologies and the refinement of their moral and symbolic systems. The ideas of the Dogon of Mali and the related Bamana (Bambara), noted also for their sculpture,s have been studied for decades by a school of anthropology founded by Marcel Griaule. The Dogon had a graded series of initiation lodges in which wisdom was progressively revealed to a religious elite. In the best-known of his publications, Conversations with Ootemmeli, Griauel describes how the Dogon assigned a learned elder to explain the origin and mysteries of the universe to him.
But where no hierarchy of religious elite existed--such as in the Lower Congo--there was no social basis for the development and authentication of cosmological knowledge. We also expect to learn about a cosmology from myths and to recognize myths by the miraculous events that occur in them, in which sacred beings and divine heroes shape the world. But in Lower Congo we find no narratives of this kind.
Instead of asking whether the BaKongo or any other people have cosmology, we could assume that they must have one, because all social interaction necessarily presupposes some ordering of the world in space and time, specifying the place of human actors within it. If two Americans meet, for example, they are usually unaware that they think anything about "cosmology" or that, if they did, it would have any relevance to their interaction. Nevertheless, to interact at all, they must know or assume certain fundamental things about each other. It is necessary to know, for example, whether the person one is addressing is alive or dead. Usually that is no problem, though it is possible to be mistaken; comedies and thrillers both exploit the shock value of such mistakes. The difference between life and death also has serious public consequences, since a live person has civil rights and legal responsibilities that a dead person does not.
The difference between life and death is not a given in nature, however; that is it is not in all cases a simple mater of observation. In the last two decades, American have repeatedly asked their courts and legislatures to decide just what the difference is. The beginning of life is as difficult to identify as the end and has given rise to as many controversies. The language used by parties to these disputes is often overtly religious, in a denominational sense, but even if it is not, their emotional tone and their feeling that these issues are fundamental tell us that we are in the domain of religion.
Cosmological distinctions about the order of the universe, the place of humankind within it, and the nature and varieties of human beings vary from one society to another. They may or may not be true in some scientific sense. Since
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